After a summer following our individual paths of rest and exploration, our annual Ingathering service calls us back to community. We return to the common work of our faith: the core principles that make for good lives and responsible co-creators of our world, and the social bonds that link each to all. Though the New York Times opinion writer, Ross Douthat, meant to be dismissive of Unitarian Universalism when he characterized our creedless religion as “Tolerance and brunch” I think he’s given us a mission statement I’m proud to pursue.
Today’s service of Ingathering marks the beginning of a new church year.
We have a year planned jam-packed with inspiring worship, enrichment for children, education and spiritual growth for adults, music and art, service to our neighborhood, fun and fellowship for ourselves, caring for one another, and service on committees to support it all.
Today the year begins.
But what is it, that is beginning?
Why are we here?
What is a church for?
Patricia Shuttee, a Unitarian woman and wife of a minister who served congregations in Ohio and Connecticut, gives us some sense of why we do what we do:
“We have joys and sorrows and hopes to share, questions, things we care about and want to help make better. Things that we would like to understand, ideas waiting to be heard. Today, we are together in gladness, once more the special community that we call our church. A community of ages that sings its songs, tells its thoughts, asks its questions, and searches together with courage and with love.”
Her poetry points to the essence of our religious community: sharing our lives, learning together, working together, singing, searching, with courage and love.
I know the gladness of the special community we call our church. And I know we have something special here we can give to others. And indeed, growing our community is a pre-eminent goal of our congregation as we replace members we lost during COVID and over the last few years, and build the next generations of our church for our next 80 years.
Who are those people that might be the next new members of our church? What are they looking for, hoping for, when they come through our door?
A few weeks ago, a columnist for the Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. wrote a piece titled, “I left the church – and now long for a ‘church of the nones’”
He doesn’t mean nuns as in a women’s religious order. He doesn’t long for a convent. He longs for a church of the people who, when asked on a survey to indicate their religious affiliation, check the box labeled “none.”
The “nones” like Perry Bacon, have risen from about 5% of the US population in the 1990s, to nearly 30% today and 40% of the 18 to 29-year olds. Most of the nones remain interested in spiritual ideas, certainly they face spiritual issues of meaning, loneliness, loss, justice as we all do. They call themselves “spiritual but not religious.”
I’m currently reading a book titled, The Great De-Churching, (by Jim Davis and Michael Graham; Zondervan, 2023) which examines the millions of formerly churched people who have left their churches in the last several decades. This “de-churching” is the largest and fastest transformation of religion in American history.
Here’s a paragraph from the book:
“Before now, the largest religious shift in church attendance in the US occurred during the twenty-five-year period after the Civil War. From 1870 to 1895, church attendance more than doubled as people resumed their postwar lives. That religious shift pales in comparison to what we are seeing today, only instead of going back to church, people today are leaving church. About 15% of American adults living today (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church, and most of this dechurching has happened in the past twenty-five years.”
That twenty-five years, by the way, is exactly the length of my ministry career. So maybe it’s my fault.
The good news, though, and the authors of The Great De-Churching are quick to point this out, most of the folks who have left church are willing to come back. In some cases, the person’s connection to church was tentative in the first place, they got out of the habit, they moved and didn’t join a new church right away, and then they re-organized their Sundays and developed new habits.
In other cases, like Perry Bacon, sharing his story in his opinion piece in the Washington Post, the idea of church still attracts him, but he’s looking for a new kind of church.
Perry Bacon grew up in a church. His father was an Assistant Pastor. He stayed in church in college. He began to drift away from church as churches in the last ten years began to segregate around politics and culture war issues. And then COVID hit, and it was easy to stay away and not go back.
But he knows what he’s missing. And he worries about what he’s not giving to his daughter.
Friends tell him to try a Unitarian Universalist church. And he does. He likes our seven principles. But he found the UU churches he attended, “overwhelmingly White and elderly” and ‘lacked the wide range of activities for adults and kids found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.”
He imagines he might start his own church, or persuade [his] friends to collectively attend one of the Unitarian Universalist churches in town [to] make it younger and more racially diverse.” But he doesn’t do that.
Instead, he sits with his longing. And he bemoans what he is missing without a church, what our nation is missing without a church-going culture: “singing, sermons and solidarity all at once.”
He says, and I so agree, “Kids need places to learn values such as forgiveness, while schools focus on math and reading. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents and some free babysitting on weekends. Retirees need places to build new relationships, as their friends and spouses pass away.”
He wonders, with all the good that churches do why people, especially left-leaning people, are abandoning church, instead of re-inventing it?
And so he closes by imagining his ideal church. A church of the “nones” he calls it. Here is his vision:
“Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional post-church brunch.
During the week, there would be activities, particularly ones in which parents could take their kids and civic-minded members could volunteer for good causes in the community.”
Oh My God! Perry!
You just described every Unitarian Universalist church I’ve ever visited and every Unitarian Universalist church I’ve led for the last twenty-five years.
He says, “I don’t expect the church of the nones to emerge. It’s not clear who would start it, fund it or decide its beliefs. But it should.”
Perry. Dear. You don’t need to start a new church. Come here! You don’t need to re-invent the church for today. Unitarian Universalists created that church decades ago.
Yes, our congregations are overwhelmingly white and elderly. Partly because the folks still in the pews are what’s left after the great de-churching took the young ones away. And is that your only complaint? Is that it? Well come to church and help us! You’ve got the right idea, Perry. Why not get your young, diverse friends together and come to church? Why not help us in our mission of diversity? You’d be enthusiastically welcomed. We could work together to make our church better for everyone. That’s what churches do. Church-goers know that belonging to a religious community doesn’t mean standing outside with folded arms, tapping your foot until the church gets perfect. Church members comes in to the church, bearing up with every community’s human imperfections while we all work together to make it better.
A couple of weeks after Perry Bacon’s opinion piece appeared in the Washinngton Post, Ross Douthat answered Bacon with his own Opinion piece in the New York Times titled, “Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?”
Again, I wanted to scream at the newspaper. “Unitarian Universalist churches exist!” We’re filled with agnostics, and atheists, and theists. Come here!
Ah, but there is Ross Douthat’s criticism.
Ross Douthat has heard of Unitarian Universalism, of course, but Douthat doesn’t believe that a church that encourages a multitude of theological beliefs is enough, either to sustain a spiritual life, or sustain a religious institution. Ross Douthat thinks that the whole reason for churches, and temples and mosques, to exist, is to proclaim a single transcendent truth, and that the church members should learn and accept that truth, and if they’re uncomfortable about it they should squirm until they can bend themselves into the shape the church tells them is good for them.
When I asked the question at the beginning of my sermon, the question for the beginning of a new church year, “Why are we here? What is church for?” Ross Douthat would say that none of that stuff Patricia Shuttee offers as answers is really essential. Church isn’t ultimately about “joys and sorrows and hopes to share, questions, things we care about and want to help make better. Things that we would like to understand, ideas waiting to be heard” and so on. Church is about doctrine.
Ross Douthat says to Perry Bacon, “Of course you can’t expect to fully garner the benefits of church without some kind of real commitment, some actual dogma or belief.” Ross Douthat doesn’t want Perry Bacon, and other “nones” to go to a Unitarian Universalist church. He wants them to go to an orthodox Christian church where they will be challenged by doctrine and persuaded eventually by the dogma of the church to accept the true belief.
This is fundamentally the difference between orthodox religion and a liberal religion like Unitarian Universalism. Orthodoxy says that belief is the business of the church. Liberal religion says that what you believe is your business.
Yes. A real commitment, an actual belief, is important to a healthy spiritual life. But it’s not the aim of the liberal church to give it to you. It’s our job, mine and the rest of this community, to help you follow your journey to your own firmly held beliefs. The job of the liberal church is to keep you moving. To offer you resources. To give encouragement when you’re struggling. To give you challenge when you’re over-confidant. And to celebrate with you when you are able to claim and proclaim a set of beliefs that support a healthy, joyful life for yourself and others and the world we share.
Ross Douthat reads Perry Bacon’s description of the ideal church of the nones and criticizes it as not enough: a song to sing, a sermon on tolerance and the news of the day, brunch afterward. Douthat says, “Does he really think you can sustain an institution on vague appeals to tolerance and brunch?”
Yes. Ross. Yes I do.
That’s the church I want. That’s the profitable way I want to spend my Sunday morning. That’s what our national culture needs. Not doctrine. Tolerance and brunch.
The core gift of a religious community is not doctrine and dogma, it’s tolerance and brunch.
It really is.
That is exactly, those two things, the glory and salvation that we offer here: tolerance and brunch.
Tolerance, meaning all of those deep questions of theology, and moral values, and principles to live by, that I preach about and we discuss and wrestle with, and think about, and challenge ourselves to live up to. That is the substance of church. The striving to be better. To make the world better. To see more clearly. To understand more deeply. To ask not just what we should do, but ask why does it matter? To wonder who we will be as people and individuals.
Yes, Tolerance.
And yes, brunch, meaning the essential function of church to bring people together in shared, loving, caring, community. That is the structure of the church. A place to laugh. To make friends. To open our lives to each other. To know the intimate truths of other people’s lives. To make peace with people who are not like us. To learn to like people, in all their weirdness and wonderfulness. We do that through singing together. Playing together. Eating together. And an occasional post-service brunch.
Two gifts that define us and fulfill us: A moral message. A meal together.
That is and always has been the essence of religious community.
It is enough.
And you, Ross, and you, Perry, are welcome to join us.